This is a story of how music collapses time, carrying ancient magic into the present. From the hum of Stonehenge’s stone circles to the bass drops of modern raves, this article traces how rhythm brings us together in shared movement while still honoring the spark of individuality that keeps the dance alive. Along the way, it draws connections to the film Sinners (2025) and reflections from the EDM community on TikTok, showing how these ancient currents continue to flow through modern culture.
The Feeling You Can’t Quite Name
Have you ever paused at a concert, looked around, and felt your eyes well up as the entire crowd moved in rhythm together? Or watched a haka performance online and felt the force rise in your chest, even without understanding a single word?
This haka video always gets me!
I find it in smaller moments too…like sitting with friends under a festival canopy, their laughter spilling into the air until it feels like the whole space is vibrating with joy.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim called this collective effervescence, a shared current of energy that rises when hearts, voices, and bodies move in harmony. In those moments, the boundary between me and we grows thin, and a quiet clarity settles over who you are within the whole.
Ancient Beats
Collective effervescence is not new. It is ancient, woven into the gatherings of our ancestors, something they must have felt beneath the same sky we stand under today.
Stonehenge, some archaeologists say, could hum like a great Tibetan prayer bowl when struck just right, its deep resonance rolling into the dark. I imagine that sound rippling outward, calling people toward its center until they shared the same breath. In the Neolithic night, one can imagine a circle gathering within the stones. Torchlight flickers, shadows dance along the ground, and a steady rhythm seems to rise from the earth itself.
Celebration as Civilization’s Heartbeat
Within those stones, the gathering was both sacred and alive with joy. It was the same joy, or perhaps the same “vices,” that Robert Evans describes in A (Brief) History of Vice as the spark behind human settlement itself. The music, the shared feast, and the intoxicating sense of unity (and yes, the literal intoxicants too) were never distractions from life, but part of what gave it shape and meaning.
Evans writes that the dancing, the feasting, and the intoxicants, often dismissed as frivolous and undervalued in the name of productivity, were in fact the foundation on which civilizations grew. “We literally started building towns and, eventually, cities so that we could throw cooler parties.” he says, a reminder that celebration was not an afterthought but the reason communities came together in the first place.
These early gatherings were filled with joy, but they also served deeper purposes. They bound communities together, preserved collective memory through stories and song, and established traditions strong enough to withstand the passing of centuries. These moments of celebration were essential parts of communal life that gave people a reason to remain connected.
Click to expand a section about the book, A (Brief) History of Vice
Robert Evans presents a vibrant and unconventional view of history, arguing that so‑called “vices” (like drinking, feasting, and other indulgences) have played key roles in shaping human civilization. Through witty research and personal experiments, he suggests that behaviors often dismissed as frivolous or reckless became foundational to developing farming communities, religious rituals, and cultural movements. Evans illustrates these ideas with humorous examples, from early beer-making fueling settled societies to sexual expression and subversive celebrations empowering marginalized groups, offering a fresh lens on how freedom, joy, and rebellion contributed to human progress.
Five Millennia Later: The Modern Dance Floor
Fast forward five thousand years, and the scene feels familiar. The stones are replaced with speaker stacks, the torches with lasers, the hum of rock with the growl of bass. The BPM still hovers in that trance-inducing range. The crowd still moves as one organism.
Beneath it all lingers the same hunger: to belong, to transcend, to blur the line between me and we without losing the rhythm of self. Whether it unfolds on a festival main stage, in a sweaty club backroom, or at a renegade deep in the woods, the ritual is unchanged. You step into the crowd and find your place within the whole. In the short documentary clip below, INZO reflects on crafting sets that go beyond hype and into depth, creating space for people to truly feel, whether it’s joy, sorrow, or stillness. It is a reminder that as we’re vibing, we are also processing, releasing, and healing.
Just as ancient fires once gathered people to dance, sing, and feel without words, the dance floor offers us the same refuge. Strangely, in its own way, whether through Skrillex’s electrifying uptempo chaos or Inzo’s soul-stirring journey of sound, I, and so many others, find healing in both. On the floor, silence is not a barrier; movement through music becomes the language, and for many of us, that is enough.
Time Collapsing on the Dance Floor
The ancestral pull of dance and musical celebration is captured with haunting beauty in the film Sinners (2025). Watching it feels like standing in two centuries at once. If you have not seen it, I cannot recommend it enough, especially if music stirs something in you that words cannot fully capture! The story moves between the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South and the spaces where music became both refuge and rebellion, places where the oppressed gathered to celebrate, to remember, and to reclaim joy.
There is a moment in the film that stays with me. A narrator speaks of musical leaders and shamans moving through time and space, their presence unbound by years (the quote is below). On screen, multiple generations dance together, each carrying their past, present, and future selves within the same rhythm. The beat feels eternal, as if it has always been here, and as if it always will be. The musical piece itself is available on YouTube and embedded below, so even if you haven’t seen the film, you can still catch a glimpse of what I mean.
There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past… and the future. In Ancient Ireland, they were called Fili. In Choctaw land, they call them Firekeepers. And in West Africa, they’re called griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities but it also attracts evil.
Annie from the movie sinners (2025)
Watching it brought me back to that flow state on a rave dance floor, where cultures, histories, and identities seem to dissolve into one rhythm, yet each dancer leaves a trace of themselves, like ripples across still water, every mark unique yet part of the same whole.
The Beauty and the Risk of Blending
This blending is part of the magic. At its best, it is cultural appreciation in motion, honoring each other’s traditions, movements, and sounds, and weaving them into something shared. Even the flow toys we spin and dance with today have roots in indigenous cultures across the world. Growing up Filipino-American, I was part of cultural dance organizations where we learned traditional folk dances, and I still recognize so many of the props in the rave community. Fans, fire, flowing skirts, and many others were part of my heritage long before I ever stepped onto a festival dance floor. Seeing them now feels like a quiet reminder that our movements are part of something much older than the moment we are in.
Artists today continue the work of weaving past and present together. One who stands out is AAYA, a former neuroscience student at UC Berkeley turned experimental bass producer, whose debut EP Refract explores how sound can reshape perception and collapse time (you can read more in her interview with The Daily Frequency). Her music blends ancestral echoes of her Middle Eastern heritage with modern basslines, carrying forward traditions of rhythm as both refuge and transformation. Listening to her feels like stepping into a living ritual, where heritage, science, and sound converge to open new ways of being together.
Seeing these connections reminds me how much beauty comes from shared traditions. Yet beauty can be fragile, and in our current capitalistic landscape, blending can come at a cost. Rave culture began as an underground movement rooted in marginalized communities resisting the mainstream. As it has grown into a global industry, access has expanded, but so has the risk of homogenization.
Check out this TikTok series by EDM creator, @jiaorgeo on the history of rave culture. The section on U.S. rave culture begins at part 16, which is included below.
This shift is not always obvious at first, but it can be felt in the details. You can see it when local warehouse crews who once hand-sewed decorations and built lighting rigs from scavenged parts are replaced by touring stage kits that look identical from city to city. The sound is still loud, the lights still bright, but the story that gave birth to it is quieter.
A Cycle as Old as Art
This is not about good or bad, but more so a recognition of the pattern as old as art itself, repeating in different forms across time. The quieting of stories, the softening of edges, has happened before. Jazz, hip hop, and punk each began within communities shaped by specific struggles, then followed a familiar arc of underground defiance, wider recognition, and eventual mass-market polish.
Each time, the challenge is to keep the grit, the story, and the individuality alive even as the circle widens. Without that, the collective effervescence risks being reduced to something sold for profit, stripped of the depth that gave it life.
Sanding Down the Rough Edges
Evans reminds us that history has a way of softening the edges, making the underground sound and the struggles that birthed it more palatable for those who never lived them. “The right rhythm can alter human consciousness,” he says, and that is exactly why systems in every era try to control it. In Sinners (2025), you can see this tension in the way music once served as a lifeline for the oppressed, a space for resistance and joy, yet over time, those raw, defiant roots risk being packaged into something safer for the mainstream.
*SPOILER VERSION* Deeper dive in the movie Sinners
In Sinners, this struggle is embodied in the antagonist, Remick, who seeks to claim Sammie’s musical gift for his own. His hunger for control mirrors how systems throughout history have tried to harness the power of rhythm for their own ends. Music has always been more than sound; it is a force that gathers people, dissolves boundaries, and kindles resistance. From sacred rituals to religious practices, leaders have recognized its ability to unify, and with that recognition often comes the desire to control or contain it. What begins as a lifeline for the many can be seized by the few, reshaping the sound into something that serves authority rather than community.
Whether the beat echoes off stones or ricochets off warehouse walls, rhythm has the power to shake something loose inside us that does not fit neatly into the structures we live under. This is the part that cannot be neatly packaged, yet it’s often the first thing to be smoothed away.
Chasing the Ancient Magic
While it is easy to be swept away by towering stages, dazzling lasers, and the sheer scale of modern festivals, it is worth remembering that music has always thrived in smaller, more intimate circles. Long before high production shows, people gathered with nothing more than drums, voices, and firelight, and the experience was no less powerful. The essence has never been spectacle but connection: the closeness of bodies moving together, the stories carried in the songs, the way rhythm can turn a gathering into something sacred. The lights may fade and the stages may change, yet the truth remains that music does not need grandeur to be transformative.
Perhaps this is the thread that ties Stonehenge, raves, and the film Sinners together: the way music dissolves time, quiets the ego, and eases the weight of isolation. It calls us to step beyond ourselves and into a collective body, while still carrying the spark of our own light. In that current of collective effervescence, strangers become kin, even when the world beyond the dance floor remains fractured.
No matter how systems change or how culture is packaged and sold, we keep finding our way back to the deep vibration that has moved through us for centuries, telling us we are not alone. From sacred circles to strobe-lit stages, from the underground to the main stage, we are still chasing the same ancient magic. Unity draws our steps, and individuality shapes our dance. And when the bass drops, if you listen closely, you might just hear the stones humming too.
Liezl
P.S. shoutout to my friend, Cassandra, who recommended I read Evans’ book, A (Brief) History of Vice, as I was on my way to Bonnaroo this year. She sent me a text that made me smile: “This audiobook says raves are spiritual and ritualistic in nature, almost like the closest mirror we have to ancient music rituals.”
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